‘Alex Strangelove’ review — A coming out dramedy with an identity crisis

Alex Strangelove, now streaming on Netflix, is a coming out dramedy with an identity crisis despite a charming lead performance by Daniel Doheny.

Netflix’s Alex Strangelove follows on the heels of Love, Simon, the first LGBT teen movie from a major studio. Love, Simon succeeds mostly in part to its lack of self-importance. It treats protagonist Simon as any other protagonist in a teen rom-com. Its unremarkableness is what makes it so unremarkable. However, what elevated Love, Simon past typical rom-com is that it has a specific perspective — albeit a narrow one — and knows that perspective inside and out. Director Greg Berlanti has empathy for his characters and allows them to be real, despite the over-saturated teen movie-ness of it all.

It’s not always fair to compare movies to each other. However, when such similarly-themed movies come out in such close proximity to each other it’s hard not to. Alex Strangelove follows Alex Truelove (Daniel Doheny), an average high-school senior who has everything going for him. He’s the class president, runs a successful YouTube channel about animals, and is on the verge of being accepted to Columbia University alongside his girlfriend Claire (Madeline Weinstein in a great performance). The one thing Alex hasn’t done yet before the end of his high school career is lost his virginity, something that he is insecure about, which Claire notices. It doesn’t help either that his group of friends seem to be the stereotypical sex-obsessed outsider teens.

For much of its first act, Alex Strangelove touts a quirky style, not unlike Mean Girls. That’s not just because the movie begins with a montage of various high school stereotypes being compared to animals. Though, if anything, it feels more forced than what Mean Girls achieves with its version of the scene. And while it’s not the most original, it works. That’s mostly thanks to Doheny’s charming performance as Alex. He overacts enough to match the style, while still maintaining some grounding in reality. His best scene — and the movie’s best scene — is his meet-cute with Elliott (Antonio Marziale).

This scene balances the two movies that Alex Strangelove is trying to be: a quirky teen sex comedy and an emotional melodrama. Alex and Elliott’s meeting is filled with awkwardness and jokes, but also has underlying sentiment as Elliott tells Alex how his coming out, which he made a video of and posted online, didn’t sit well with his father and was eventually kicked out. This slow down in the narrative works because it’s a genuine moment set within the context of the movie. Director Craig Johnson tries to recapture that feeling along the way — Claire speaking to her cancer-stricken mother, Alex’s friend Dell (Daniel Zolghadri) talking about rejection — but never quite gets there again. It feels like the studio asked for a raunchy sex comedy while Johnson set out to make a teen melodrama.

Love, Simon is the perfect example of a movie that strikes a balance between the two. That’s because Simon earns its emotional moments without slowing down the narrative or taking a pause from the inherent comedy of it all. Alex Strangelove tries to be what Love, Simon ended up being, but gets distracted along the way. Of course, both movies were filmed at the same time, so any similarities are purely coincidental. But they serve as counterpoints to each other. Simon does the teen coming out movie right, while Alex misses the mark.

I had similar issues with The Skeleton Twins, Johnson’s last project starring Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader. In that movie, he mines the tropes of a family drama and infuses it with a darkly comedic tone that shifts awkwardly throughout. He handles the two movies that he’s trying to create better in Alex Strangelove but still doesn’t mend the two seamlessly together.

That being said, the fact that Alex Strangelove is on the homepage of Netflix and Love, Simon coming to VOD in the same month is heartening. And the movie has its moments. Alex and Elliott’s meet-cute, their trip to Brooklyn, and much of the first act work even if the connecting pieces don’t. I pined for more scenes of Alex and Elliott’s chemistry, which to the credit of Doheny and Marziale, is palpable. I wish we got more of that movie.

★★ out of five